


god/god

by navience



Category: The Poppy War - R. F. Kuang
Genre: 3 days in the valley, Drug Use, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28188789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navience/pseuds/navience
Summary: “Chaghan Suren, I think about you in my sleep. I think about you when I’m training and when I’m eating. I think I know you when you hate me. You and your stupid lunar eyes and the way you're perpetually smirking— the right side of your mouth is higher than the left, by the way, and it’s absolutely fucking endearing— and the way you look when you’re meditating. You live rent free in my head and I fucking hate it. You understand nothing.”“Are you deflecting?”“Is it working?” Chaghan considers for a moment.“Yeah.”
Relationships: Chaghan Suren/Altan Trengsin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	god/god

**Author's Note:**

> this is a mess i'm so sorry but uhh i was like "hey twitter what happened when chaltan was in the desert" and everyone ever said "they fucked" but i am but a 17 year old and also i didn't want to write that so here's this instead sorry to everyone ever. i think it's ok? idk i want to write more chaltan and get in their heads more. their relationship was probably more unhealthy than this but i will get the dynamic right someday

“Chaghan Suren,” his hair is white, his outstretched hand bony and pale. Altan grasps it. Suren’s grip is warmer and firmer than he’d expected it to be. His eyes are pale and cold, like the moon. Altan thinks it’s strangely, revoltingly alluring. His lips press together, his jaw working.

“Altan Trengsin.”

“I know.”

They whirl away from each other, each bitterly ensconced in his own problems.

Their relationship is tense, toleration at best. Quietly, Chaghan resents Altan’s easy way with people, the neatness with which he fits into the Cike. He wants to shake him by the shoulders and scream: _How can you trust so easily? Don’t you know there’s a traitor beside you? Are you so self-assured in your god’s perverse presence that you don’t see me? Why don’t you see me?_

Altan, inversely, does what he has always done with high-handed, manipulative, powerful people: he ignores him. He simmers furiously under the surface, finds it easier to call the fire when he’s thinking about Chaghan and his distantly cold expression, his spindly body that works behind the scenes instead of openly on the battlefield. 

They never come to blows in the few months they are merely comrades.

Tyr drowns, folded into his goddess’ darkness.

Only then do they hate each other.

“You’re the Cike’s commander,” Baji grimaces. “Congrats, man.”

Altan can’t breathe. Him, commander? Of these wild people? It’s everything he’s ever wanted. He vows to himself, then and there, that he’ll find the path between madness and death, that he’ll protect these people as they protect Nikan. He is commander; he is in control, for once in his life. War looms on the horizon and he’ll be freer than Tyr was under Daji. War looms on the horizon and there are stars in Altan Trengsin’s eyes.

Chaghan reels, watching him. He sees the hope flaring in his eyes, the determined glint. That should be him. _His_ calculating gaze surveying the Cike, _his_ blood singing with adrenaline, _his_ face flushing with triumph. He is the most powerful shaman there has ever been. He is the son of the last true khan of the Hinterlands. He was sent to kill the commander. Who is Altan? 

What else? A Speerly.

“That should be my title,” the words bounce around Chaghan’s skull until he spits them at the glowing golden boy. “I should be leading the Cike.”

“It’s more than a title,” Altan fires back, filled full of righteous superiority. “And you will listen to your commander.”

“You are not my commander.” His voice is hard. “I have no reason to listen to you, Trengsin.” Altan’s eyes light up and so does the air around him, heat suddenly snapping in the chill air. 

“You will listen to me,” he steps closer, “and you will obey me,” he presses one steadily heating hand to Chaghan’s breastbone, “and if you won’t respect me, you will fear me.” His hand bursts into flame.

(Behind them, Qara chokes and doubles over, hand pressed to her own sternum. Baji rolls his eyes and murmurs “Get a room.”)

Chaghan reaches into Altan’s mind and pushes, hard. The flame stops.

Altan stares at him, his right eye twitching. He and his god have never been stopped before.

“I’ll kill you if I have to. Step the fuck down.” 

Altan is more than a shaman, Chaghan realizes midway through the first time Altan hits him, his head snapping back, his lithe mortal body reeling. He can’t try to fight him, he realizes, and he’s on the ground within two moves anyway. Altan smiles down at him, and the light in his eyes is fractured. With the newborn wonder of a deer seeing a wolf for the first time, Chaghan wonders if he’s made a mistake.

“At dawn,” he says, white canines glinting with saliva. “Challenge me then.”

Chaghan should be better than Altan. He has lineage, teaching, _time_ on his side. He has been training since birth. He has an anchor, while Altan flounders in the spirit world. 

Chaghan should be better than Altan, but he’s not.

He challenges him three times, battles him psychically and spiritually and physically, and each time—

He loses. There are bruises shadowing his ribs and burns limning those. He traces them in the mirror, awed and disgusted by his enemy’s prowess. Qara looks at him, and even though she is his other half— his soul, his ruthless mind’s heart, his frail body’s muscle, he can’t read the smug tilt of her lips.

“I don’t understand,” he snaps, and the way he says it makes it clear that it is Altan’s fault, that Altan is the aberration in their violent equation. “There’s no fucking end to his well.”

“You understand,” Qara says. “You are the Cike’s Seer. You know more than all of them put together.” The words are not a balm. They are a neutral reminder, almost a reprimand. “What you can’t see is only something you’ve blinded yourself to.”

“Shut up,” he grunts, brother to sister, and she laughs and strokes her hawk’s feathers.

The next time they fight is different. 

Well, Chaghan still ends up on the ground, wheezing and furious. But this time, Altan asks him a question.

“If I must,” Chaghan says bitterly. He pats Altan’s cheek, which is smooth and dry, not even tainted with sweat. “Get off me.”

Altan does, his smile wide and disingenuous.

“You could be a little more grateful. It’s a vacation. I’ve never had one of those.”

“It is _not_ a vacation,” Chaghan grumbles as he stands and brushes off his clothes. “It is a death match in the desert. It is a funeral in the sand. It is like shoving a cactus up my—”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll actually kill you when we get there,” Altan says affably. “Which, by the way, is not in my plans.”

Chaghan packs more than, perhaps, he needs.

“I thought that was used only recreationally?” Qara says, arching her brow and looking, unnervingly, exactly like him.

“It is,” he says. “I cannot possibly be expected to hang around him sober, nor can I be expected to fight him all the time. He _says_ he won’t kill me, so I can’t kill him.” This is irritating.

“Oh, then you’ll be fine,” she says dismissively. “Use protection, okay?” And then she ignores his indignant spluttering. 

All Altan brings is food and his stupid trident. The thing is too tall and too heavy and has poked holes in Chaghan too many times. He scowls at it. Altan sticks his tongue out at him in response.

Altan stares at Chaghan’s annoying, ramrod straight back as they walk steadily further into the desert. He feels like his back, even, is taunting him and his authority. If Chaghan’s back could talk, it would probably say, _Even though I am a smarmy prig the color of fish belly, I am a better shaman and a better commander and a better person than you. So ha!_ He takes solace in imagining Chaghan’s back as being not very good at taunting. 

Also, there’s a little bit of stupid exposed neck looking stupid right where Altan can stupid see, where Chaghan’s hair curls over it like little white clouds, the kind that feather over the sky and have the gall to be impossible to touch. This fact does not endear Chaghan to him, although he has to admit the fluffy strands would be almost attractive if on literally anyone else. 

Altan frowns and imagines sliding his sword into the Seer’s back. 

“Is this far enough, you dithering idiot?” Chaghan asks.

“Yeah, it’s good.”

"Well. Good."

Altan lights him on fire.

The tower of flame is exhilarating to watch. It builds, scales upon scales of flame overlapping before melding together into a solid wall of radiant death. It’s beautiful mayhem, sensual destruction, a perfect construct of rage. It is the pure power of a heartless god. It spins around him, swirling like the folds of some expensive, destructive fabric, swallows him whole, and then it spits him back out again.

“What the fuck,” Chaghan gasps when he falls out, because the fire, molded around his exact shape, a bare inch from his skin, reached into his lungs and ate up all his oxygen, and because Altan is a little bit petty and only human, so his hair is crisped all the way down to his slightly flushed, sweating skull.

Altan prepares himself for pushback.

“Fuck,” Chaghan gasps, rubbing his palms on his trousers. “The control you have— fuck, that’s insane. You’re insane. You’re actually insane.”

Altan shrugs.

“Shit,” Chaghan says, and keels over.

When he comes to, his head is in Altan’s lap, Altan’s hands brushing softly over his skull. It feels soft, a genuinely weird sensation. Delirious with waking and adrenaline crash, Chaghan settles into the touch, the traces of Altan’s calloused palms leaving trails of sexy electricity as they sweep over his unevenly shorn hair. Belatedly, he realizes that Altan is brushing away the ashy remains of his hair. He sniffs the air languidly, wonders why the acrid scent isn’t more of a jolt to his chemically sedated brain. 

“You up, Chaghan?” Altan asks. “I know I didn’t kill you.”

“I hate you,” Chaghan says.

“I know,” Altan says.

“You’re amazing,” Chaghan says.

“I know,” Altan says.

Chaghan passes out again and wakes up on a sleeping mat, in a tent, alone.

That’s the first night.

The first day is awkward, to say the least. Chaghan still hates Altan, and Altan seems satisfied with Chaghan’s temporary subjugation. They eat breakfast together and neither of them try to kill each other even a little. Altan doesn’t even feel Chaghan poking around his brain to find the source of his rage. This is an improvement that regresses almost completely within the next three hours.

At lunch, Chaghan poisons Altan and tries to fight him in the spirit realm. This is a mistake, he admits; he has to shake off the ghosts of a thousand dead residents of Speer when they come back. 

Once Altan finishes throwing up everything he’s ever ingested from the combined effects of the poison and the spirit realm, he blacks both of Chaghan’s eyes. Chaghan takes this in surprisingly good grace, i.e. with a smug sense of long-suffering patience that says _Oh, the poor Speerly can’t control his anger_ , so he breaks the wrist on his non-dominant hand. 

In the evening, Chaghan interrupts Altan’s thousand nightly sit-ups to try tackling him, which fails almost embarrassingly. However, his ominous prediction of Altan’s impending fiery doom paired with the image of another Speerly, a girl they haven’t met yet, delivered in the middle of the night for extra _oomph_ delivers the desired effect of making Altan angrier than he’s ever seen him. 

It’s possibly the angriest he’s ever been.

Chaghan sleeps through the second night and most of the second day. Occasionally, he feels something damp being dabbed on his brow. Soup is spilled over his shirt and nearly drowns him when it finally makes it into his mouth. He’s pulled roughly from side to side, place to place. Mostly, he sleeps. 

He wakes on the third night to Altan’s screaming. His pain is palpable.

His every cell feels like it’s on fire. Distantly, he wonders if he is the sun, his cells combusting and splitting and _on fire_ , and yet, he’s still pitiably alive. He hates it, hates this fucking life where he’s alone, so alone, the only one left. He sees his family, still alive, their red eyes and grim faces, headed to war like so many before them. A long and glorious tradition of death at the hands of one oppressor or the other. It almost feels like a betrayal that he wishes he were dead like them.

When he lies down and sees _his_ star, he can feel the straps of the Mugenese lab table. He can feel the second tragedy of his childhood weigh upon him. He hears doctors, muttering to each other, scribbling results, watching him die inside with curious indifference. He hears his cousins' screams. In another time, Altan feels hot tears evaporating from his face.

When he sees Chaghan, battered and bruised, dragging him from the ashes of his own tent, his screams pitch up and echo across the empty sands. He thrashes wildly, tries to burn Chaghan, encases himself in a firestorm. Altan Trengsin is the sunrise come early, the blood on the sky. Only now does Chaghan understand him.

It is so horrendously difficult to be Altan Trengsin.

Altan, he thinks, is strong beyond his strength, hard beyond his muscle. Altan is burning alive, all the time, and still he wakes up and he does not try to end the world that has hurt him. For all he's beaten Chaghan, he is kind to the rest of the Cike. He hides his smoking from Ramsa and speaks quietly around Unegen. _How_ , Chaghan wonders again, _how can you trust so easily? Don't you know the blood price the world wants from you_ _?_

And Altan pays it. And Altan knows it. The world hates Altan, and he loves more deeply than anyone Chaghan has ever known. He's ready to drop to his knees then and there and worship him as a new god.

But now? Altan is vulnerable in every way, his skin bloody where he’s torn at imaginary binds and his mental wards collapsed, and he’s so _tired_. 

“Altan,” Chaghan’s voice cuts across his delirium, and he sobs at the sound of it, at the cold caress of Chaghan’s golden eyes. Fingers press at his mouth and he bites them, tastes coppery blood and wonders if it’s his own. 

“Opium,” he gasps, “please. Please, Shiro.”

“Sleep, Altan, _sleep_.” Chaghan presses a tablet beneath his tongue and another finger to his forehead. 

Altan’s last thought is that the idiot shouldn’t have been up and moving in his condition.

The drugs wear off on the third day. Altan bolts up, flame already bursting from both of his palms. 

“Give it a rest, Altan,” Chaghan’s voice comes wearily from where he’s sat, knees to his chest. “I can’t take any more.”

“You shouldn’t be moving,” Altan frowns, extinguishing the flame. Chaghan slumps, the lines across his face easing. “Your condition—”

“I’ll be fine,” Chaghan dismisses with a wave of his hand, two fingers and his right thumb bandaged. “What happened? Are _you_ alright?”

“Of course I am.” Silence. “What?” 

“Playing dumb isn’t a good look on you.” Altan pushes himself into a sitting position. 

“I could hurt you.” A smile, a real one, crosses Chaghan’s face.

“Yeah.”

“You’re done fighting?” 

“I’m done fighting.” Chaghan nods solemnly.

“Fuck,” the back of Altan’s head thumps on the floor. “You’re annoying as hell, you know that? Hinterlander brat.”

“Thank you.”

The last supper is tense in a new and uncomfortable way. 

Chaghan’s pale eyes slide over to meet Altan’s burning red ones, then snap back to his food. Altan eats with his usual vigor, like he won’t get another meal for a long, long time. When Chaghan’s vision catches on him too long, he’s only saved by a sudden wave of vertigo. Every part of his body is hot and sore, and when Altan catches him, the places they touch burn hotter and hurt more.

“You’re flushed. Are you alright?” Chaghan chuckles drily.

“Didn’t you do it to me?” Altan shoots him a look. “Fine, I won’t speak.”

“That’s not what I said.” Altan is picking at his food now, eating it sliver by sliver. There’s a layer of something tantalizing just beneath the rough first meaning of his words, something Chaghan wants to uncover.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“As you are unfortunately prone to doing.”

“You’re alone.” Altan freezes, and their fire does too. It’s a frightening sight. A boy and his pet. A man and his bomb.

“No shit.”

“Knowing fully well that asking this might result in my immediate demise, did you recognize her? The other Speerly?”

“Yeah,” Altan says, and his voice is rough. “Not from home— I mean, not from Speer. She was at Sinegard, my last year. I thought she was just from the south.”

“You talked?”

“No,” Altan said, grimacing. “She was terrified of me. Or in love with me. She was in her first year. She’s probably tearing the school apart by now.”

“Like she’s already your little sister.”

“The fuck are you on, Chaghan?”

“You talk about her like you know her already, like she’s family.”

“If she’s at Sinegard, she’ll come out exactly like me,” Altan says, his voice taking on an unusual quality. “I know it.”

“You think that’s a bad thing?”

“Get out of my head.”

“You really are insane,” Chaghan shakes his head sadly. “The greatest fighter of our time, the lynchpin in the Empress’ war, thinks he’s no good. You’re amazing, Altan. I meant it when I said it.”

“I’m not half good enough.”

“What do you have to live up to?”

“My mother civilization,” Altan says, and goes back to tearing jerky apart.

“If you don’t exemplify Speer, who will?”

“I said to get out of my head.”

“When you get out of mine.”

“Chaghan Suren, I think about you in my sleep. I think about you when I’m training and when I’m eating. I think I know you when you hate me. You and your stupid lunar eyes and the way you're perpetually smirking— the right side of your mouth is higher than the left, by the way, and it’s absolutely fucking endearing— and the way you look when you’re meditating. You live _rent free_ in my head and I fucking hate it. You understand nothing.”

“Are you deflecting?”

“Is it working?” Chaghan considers for a moment. 

“Yeah.”

Chaghan finds that Altan— undefeatable, decisive, strong Altan Trengsin— is hesitant in this. His lips hover a hair’s breadth from his, his strong hands don’t know where to settle. Chaghan is the one who presses his lips to Altan’s, the one who leads gently when the other man seems barely lost. 

“I understand exactly how you feel,” Chaghan says breathlessly when they break apart. “I feel it too. You feel it?” Altan nods jerkily. Chaghan sighs. 

"What?"

"I'm supposed to kill you." He expects Altan to recoil, for a mask to drop over his perfect features, for him to be angry. Instead, Altan laughs, deep in his throat.

"And?"

"The Cike was my aunt's experiment. The Sorqan-Sira-sanctioned band of Nikara shamans. And I'm supposed to— to lock up the ones who lose themselves, to kill the ones who can be killed when necessary, to cull commanders."

"Will you hurt me?"

"I love you, Altan. It's fucked up."

"Will you hurt me?" 

Without hesitation. "No."

"Will you disobey me?"

"No."

"Then it's not a problem. Don't worry about it." Chaghan makes a face.

"I wasn't worried, precisely."

"Why aren't you? Don't all shamans lose their minds?"

"I don't think that's true. I think we can bring them back." Altan tilts his head, considers it. Chaghan admires the clean lines of him.

"They do deserve better."

"I see it, Altan," he says, and there's passion in his usually infuriatingly neutral voice. "With you at the helm? I can see a new age of shamanism." He watches the light dawn in Altan's eyes. He knows Altan is loathe to lose another family.

"You're certain."

"No," Chaghan admits. He's enough of a realist for that. 

"I am." Altan's delusional. But Chaghan worships him. Is the word of a god not law?

He's no longer blind. He loves the burn without shame.

“Do you have want to smoke?”

Altan’s never been so comfortable with another person before. He brushes his hand along the small of Chaghan’s back, lets him touch his neck, his chest, his arms. Their thighs touch. He inhales deeply, exhales clouds into Chaghan’s open, waiting mouth. He smiles when he kisses him. 

Chaghan is something new to him. The hollows of his body, the hard press of his collarbone. The smoke smells sweet. It taints the taste of Chaghan’s skin.

Love is something new to Altan Trengsin.

He thinks he likes it.

The fourth night, they leave.

“You ready to go home?”

Chaghan’s lips press to Altan’s temple, quick and soft. He wraps his hand around the trident.

“Your call, Commander.”


End file.
